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So, it’s been a long time since the last update. Over recent months, I’ve been receiving many messages, both on the forum, privately and in the IRC channel, about the status of the project. People seem to mostly be assuming that it is either dead, or come to a permanent standstill. The short answer is, no, it isn’t dead… it has just been progressing very slowly for the past year and a half.

But in my mind, that in and of itself isn’t a good enough explanation. I know there are fans out there whom have desperately yearned for a second release on this project to come to fruition, whom have probably checked the website regularly over the two years since the last news update, and wondered what was going on. They deserve to know exactly what is holding this project up, and so I will do my best to explain.

Though we’ve had many team members come and go over the years, the one area we’ve always struggled with the most consistently was in getting new mappers. Mappers for the Doom 3 engine are already a scarce commodity, and when you throw in the fact that nobody is getting paid a cent for any of their work, it can become an especially challenging task to find people who are truly dedicated. Mapping and level design take time, energy, hard work, discipline, creativity, and a willingness to scrap work of your own that isn’t up to par. People have lives of their own, jobs, relationships, hobbies, other things to work on, so when something as demanding as ‘make a game for free’ enters their lives, it really becomes a question of just how dedicated someone is, and how much they are willing to sacrifice. Which brings me to my main point.

For the last 3+ years, I (Caffeine Freak) been the only active level designer on EOC. Though much of the other work on the mod is completed and the levels comprise roughly 85% of the remaining work, the fact is that it has been somewhat of a slow haul due to a) me being the only one working on level design, and b) it being an extremely challenging task to divide my life between Hexen: EOC and Doom 3: Phobos (which I joined in May 2010, also as a level designer), not to mention balancing both of these with the other areas of my personal life. There’s more than enough work involved in a mod of this scale to comprise the hours at a full-time job; working on two simultaneously sometimes means you don’t have much of a life outside of modding.

All of that aside, I’m determined to finish this. If the project is left to die, then all the countless hours of work that myself and others have put in since our demo release in November of 2010 will never see the light of day. That is simply unacceptable. As for an estimated release date, I can’t say at this point. The end is in sight, and while I’d like to be able to finish and release this in 2016 and see that as being very possible, I can’t give any specific release estimates. For now though, I’d like to post some screenshots of both some as-yet-unseen work and also some revised and re-polished areas to let you all know that progress is being made. And I promise you that I will do my damndest to see this all through to the end.

2013 was a slower than desired year. 2014 will not be. The year has kicked off with an excited vigor and focus which has the team pretty pumped. First, we welcome programmer Calavera_Jo to the team who has helped bring some of this energy into the team. Very talented and enthusiastic, he’s already tackled a wide range of tasks from a refined blocking system to editor fixes to cleaning the environment of our code more.

The maps have continued to make progress as Caffeine Freak has become much more efficient in his terrain modelling. H2m2 is nearing it’s completion of layout and detailing with game play to follow. Zurra has been taking care of some of our art needs. We still would love to add more members to our team (especially artists!), so if interested please contact us.

We’ll be looking to assemble a small testing team once again with a current eye around late second quarter. More on that to come in the next few months.

Just a quick update for everyone. We’ve had some inquiries as to how things are going and such. We keep chipping away! Caffeine Freak, our lead level designer, has been a lot of patch geometry in our new levels with terrain models and making tons of progress. Most of the 9 levels to be included in the next release are built out. Mainly just 2 levels left need most of the work still.

With a lot of this new terrain modeling however, we really could use a texture artist. Contact us if interested! It would really help and allow the new terrain to shine for an artist to go through and create some great new textures for them. Someone dedicated to that task would help speed things up significantly in the future.

Enjoy a few new shots below. We have finally gotten the player model rig in game which is exciting! Happy Quakecon to all.

If you couldn’t tell from the title……we bring updates. It’s clearly been a while since our last update, but we’ve been silently(and slowly) plugging away at our next release. Sometimes there’s just no point in pointless drivel and the best choice of action is to work. All of our newer recruits never panned out, and some of our current members understandably have been pretty busy. Never the less….we work.

Our ever talented and dedicated lead mapper, Caffeine Freak, continues to map. Of our 8 total levels to be included in next release, 6 of them are more or less complete. 1 is blocked out well enough and the other currently being built. It’s getting closer, but more is still needed. We are aiming for end of year, but it’s still too soon to promise that.

We are standalone as previously posted. It’s still pretty exciting as it was when we first broke our ties to Doom 3. We are fans, freely working on a free game, hopefully, for your future enjoyment of the Hexen world. With all of that being said though, we are actively looking for more talent to help us accomplish our goals in shorter time.

We’d love for some extra art help. Concept, 3D or 2D(in that priority of need) would be fantastic. We still have an active artist but someone to help him by creating concepts would go a long way in wrapping up some of our remaining static and weapon model tasks. A character artist would ultimately help for the future as well. Either way, we’d love to hear from you even if concept drawing is your main focus. Beyond art asset creation, we are always open to the other fields as well. Level designers of course, but even an extra programmer never hurts(especially if you are experienced in Linux and OSX).

Now the fun stuff! In our silence, we decided to break it with some game footage with new weapons and monsters in action in some of our new levels. We hope you enjoy it and the new music from Mystic Realmz! The more classic styled tunes have really been adding some great back drops to all of our levels. Enjoy!

Welcome to another update! After a relatively slow July, things have started to pick up steam again. Our cool new addition recently was the Porkalator finally taking shape. Gavlig rigged and animated the model and Solarsplace set up its code. It’s quite the fun artifact! It’s one of the biggest requests we had gotten since last release (right next to the Dark Servant) so many Hexen fans will be pleased to see it functional.

We update this month with a progress report of where the team is currently at. After giving away a few games through our Steam group and officially cutting our final attachments to Doom 3(ARB Shaders) in the last few months, the team talked a bit about our best path for our next release. We had some discussion, posted some pros/cons and ultimately came up with getting a release out sooner rather than later.

The next release was penned as all of the cleric’s episode(3 hubs, 12 levels) and we’ve been working towards that since our previous release. It was a little too spread out, perhaps, to get such a larger release together in a suitable time frame. So with that we’ve decided to refocus a bit and push a next release of Hub 1 and 2(8 levels total) for our next release, effectively getting new content to everyone much sooner. Then of course pushing for the full episode release shortly after(especially since we have the Hub already under development currently).

We’ll have more news on that in the near future. For now a little concept some of you may have already seen for the cleric player model we are currently working on:

Finally, we are actively looking for a texture artist to join our team. Level textures and assets provided by a modeler are the main duties of this position. Just send us a message if interested! (Level designers too are always welcome!)

Hello all! This is a short little post simply to announce something new we are looking to try out. Brought on by the fact that it has now been 16 years since the retail release of Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders (3/31/1996 according to wikipedia), there is probably plenty of gamers who don’t have their copies or weren’t even around to have played it. After doing some thinking we decided: Why not try a giveaway through Steam?

We have a Steam group here and the platform has made it so easy to gift games that we see this as a great opportunity. The hope is that by giving away the heretic/hexen steam bundle or individual games (and trying to make this some type of semi-regular event), people can get interested in the world from the beginning. Plus everyone loves free games right?

Having a chance to get the gift is easy – join our Steam group. We’ll just select a random member by our next developer interview and that’s it! You’ll be given the heretic/hexen Steam bundle that includes Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders, Hexen: Beyond Heretic, Hexen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel, and Hexen II.

Welcome all to our first installment of new developer interviews! This week we introduce to you Caffeine Freak. Our lead level designer and the main reason our first release even materialized as a playable game. Head on over to our moddb page and Enjoy!

While it’s been an extended delay between postings, we certainly bring good news(don’t we always?). To start off please note that we have moved our main domain to http://hexenmod.net and the old .com is forwarding for now. The whole team keeps rolling on as we have been. We’ve moved development entirely over to standalone now with the GPL code due to the exhaustive work put forth from our programmer Solarsplace. At the moment the team is sort of split between 2 goals. Level designers and modelers continue to focus on our next release in terms of levels and game content while the other few of us have been focusing the majority of our time on fixing the holes that were presented by dropping Doom 3 as our base. There’s still plenty of work to be done on both fronts but work continues to get done daily.

On top of that a previous modeler, Zurra, has returned to the team! His main focus is static modeling as it was before and it is certainly great to have him back. You can recognize some of his previous work on the team in the form of the boots of speed and chaos device. He’s currently working on wrapping up some other much needed pickup models.

Also joining us in the static modeling department is Gavlig! Joining just a few days after Zurra, he has been tasked for the moment primarily as supporting our level designers with much needed models for props and quests. It’s definitely perfect timing for our designers.

With all of the new members over the last 2 years we have amassed quite a new team and because of this will be resuming our old “Meet the developers” interview style posts on a twice monthly timeline. It’s a great way for individual members to get their background out there if they choose. We hope everyone enjoys it!

As always if there are any interested developers our there, especially level designers, we’d love to hear from you!